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This one is all about the dancers. It’s about how, to the audience, they look, feel and taste. How astonishing they are in form and function. How magnificent the human body can be and how powerful its effects on an observer.

On the dancers’ side of the fourth wall there’s something more private and alluring going on. Rafael Bonachela’s dancers have always been an integral part of the choreographer’s creative process but they have never looked more fundamentally embedded in the fabric of the piece than here, nor more mysterious.

ab [intra] (meaning from within) has not the slightest degree of narrative. It is moulded from moods and sensations, aided in no small way by the spare, elegant designs by Damien Cooper (lighting) and David Fleischer (production and costumes). The visual austerity is arrestingly achieved and gorgeous to look at. Fleischer’s vast white space is filled only with light and the dancers’ energy. Cooper sometimes lifts the wattage but his illumination is mostly restrained and filtered, primarily through the persistent haze that gives ab [intra] a dreamy quality.

The exacting simplicity is counterbalanced by Nick Wales’s sumptuous electronica-meets-cello score that intersperses new music by Wales with movements from works by Latvian composer Peteris Vasks. While the cello is the dominant voice (one is reminded that it’s an instrument played with the body intimately wrapped around it), Wales also uses other strings, often heard played pizzicato, the piano and percussion in his richly furnished, emotionally involving aural soundscape.

Charmene Yap and Davide Di Giovanni in ab [intra]. Photo: Pedro Grieg

It’s fascinating to see how the ferocious, out-there physicality of the dancers is used in the service of a work that teems with secrets. Everywhere you look there are unexpected moves, groupings, gestures and connections that don’t reveal themselves fully, even when certain images or phrases return.

At the beginning light is diffused through slats high above the stage and at all times if dancers come to the front of the stage they are in silhouette. The closer they get to the audience the less they can be seen and the more intriguing they appear.

One very brief interaction, seen early and later repeated, consists of a crouching person stroking the leg of one standing. The two are by no means the centre of attention and, because they are so far forward and to the side, there is little light on them. The meaning is impossible to decipher and yet the image lingers, as do many other small, pungent moments.

These swirl around more formal set pieces. Janessa Dufty and Izzac Carroll’s erotically entwined duo has a glowing, mystical quality. They scarcely leave the ground and are literally wrapped in one another. In the second central duo, Charmene Yap and Davide Di Giovanni are tender and ecstatic but not entirely knowable either. Their partnering is lush, intricate, often surprising and exceptionally beautiful.

Phenomenal Nelson Earl has an anguished, torso-twisting solo in which he seems to seek escape from himself, implacably observed by a stock-still line of eerily lit others; later, Ariella Casu similarly removes herself from the group to dance to her own rhythm but is euphoric.

And what is happening in all those trios? Three is a magic number – third time lucky – but three’s also a crowd. There is inherent drama in groups of uneven number, a situation Bonachela amplifies when two groups of five face off. And there are, as it happens, eight women and seven men in ab [intra].

It’s impossible to catch everything, no matter how hard you try, which only adds to the intensity of the experience. Everyone on stage has their own part to play, enacting intimate dramas or watching closely as they unfold. Over the years Sydney Dance Company has been home to dancers of remarkable presence and personality. Dufty has been there for a decade, Yap not much less. Both are glorious. At the other end of the scale, Earl joined in 2016, Carroll and Di Giovanni last year and Casu this year. It’s incredibly satisfying to see that even though there’s been quite a bit of change in the ranks recently, that bracing individuality remains. ab [intra] is proof positive.

Ends in Sydney May 26. Then Melbourne, May 30-June 2; Darwin, June 15; Perth, June 28-30; Canberra, August 30-September 1. Regional centres in Western Australia, Queensland and NSW, June 20-August 11.

Sydney Dance Company artistic director Rafael Bonachela clearly adores 2 One Another. Made in 2012, it was revived in 2013, 2014 and 2015, is much travelled and this season celebrates its 100th performance by making its first reappearance in Sydney. Next stop is Shanghai.

Audiences love it too, and why not? It’s a glamorous production that shows the full company in ferocious form. Just when you think the SDC dancers couldn’t possibly look more magnificent, more dynamic, more super-human, they do.

Sydney Dance Company in 2 One Another (earlier cast). Photo: Pedro greig

There are only six dancers of SDC’s current complement of 16 who were in the original cast but Bonachela chooses his company members well. The youngest of them haven’t yet fully developed the combination of intensity, muscularity and sophistication that the more experienced dancers wear like a second skin but they add other colours. Their hunger for the work is palpable and rather touching.

It’s a beautiful thing to see three young men, Sam Young-Wright, Izzac Carroll and Nelson Earl, growing into themselves. Young-Wright and Carroll are tall and rangy and both still have a coltish air about them; Earl brings a sense of danger to the stage. Each has a distinct personality.

Tony Assness’s design, Nick Wales’s music and Benjamin Cisterne’s lighting work together brilliantly to create a highly charged sensory experience and Bonachela’s choreography is intricately detailed and patterned. Those 16 amazing dancers are pushed to the limit and beyond in a complex weave of group dynamics, duos and solos.

Current cast of Rafael Bonachela’s 2 One Another. Photo: Pedro Greig

The title of the work is illustrated in the opening moments. Most of the dancers stand close to one another, flanked on one side by a solo figure and on the other by a seated duo. All are dressed similarly in form-fitting dark green with mesh inserts and, as lights flash and unsettling music thunders, they gesture in unison. The unanimity doesn’t hold and soon the piece is off and running.

Partnerships form, dissolve and reform differently, echoed by changing paintings in light on the huge LED screen at the back of the stage. For some sections the music moans and groans like a living creature while others moments are bathed in the aural glow of the Baroque and the Renaissance. The score also incorporates some spoken word in the form of poetry fragments by Samuel Webster.

It’s hard to decipher all of Webster’s contribution in the sound mix and greater access to it would have been useful.

The 2012 program prints some of Webster’s lines and they speak of great intimacy. Bonachela writes in his program note (both then and now) that Webster responded to things he saw from the dancers in the rehearsal room at an early stage of development and then later the dancers used his words to create movement. “The text that Samuel created is very beautiful and full of love and emotion and I sought to create movement that explored all those intensities of human interaction,” Bonachela writes.

Janessa Dufty in 2 One Another. Photo: Pedro greig

For the most part 2 One Another doesn’t achieve that goal. There is so much to stimulate the eye and please the ear that the somewhat cool temperature takes a little bit of time to register, but after perhaps 40 minutes of wonderful dancing one looks in vain for deep human connection. Assness’s CV bulges with creative direction for big events and he knows how to deliver the wow factor. It’s just that 2 One Another could do with a bit less of that.

Individual company members stir the blood, as they always do, although Assness has done his best to impose a degree of anonymity on the dancers by styling them in a way that means you have to look twice and three times at some of them to confirm they are indeed who you think they are.

Still, it’s impossible not to register Janessa Dufty and Charmene Yap in particular (one of Bonachela’s most precious attributes as a choreographer is the equal standing he gives women and men). Dufty and Yap were both in the premiere of this work five and a half years ago and their power and authority are still a joy to see.

The same is true for Juliette Barton, who has been with SDC since 2009 and is ever more magisterial as the years go by. Some warmth emerges about two thirds of the way through the 65-minute piece when the dancers appear in looser, red garments and, in a memorable duet, Barton and Bernhard Knauer reach for something beyond exhilarating movement.

At first glance the two works in Sydney Dance Company’s Orb look quite different but they are close kin under the skin and together make an exceptionally absorbing double bill.

Cheng Tsung-lung, who choreographed the opening Full Moon, is artistic director of Taipei’s Cloud Gate 2 and steeped in the aesthetic of that company’s senior arm, Lin Hwai-min’s incomparable Cloud Gate Theatre. The dance is contemporary but holds hands with age-old traditions. When you recognise shapes from martial arts or the influence of meditative practices, you are taken into a world where great antiquity co-exists with the here and now and gives it texture and meaning.

SDC artistic director Rafael Bonachela is a lively exponent of movement, music and design as their own reward. So often in his work there is no past and no future. It’s a world of sensation rather than explanation – although not in every single case, as his recent Lux Tenebris (2016) and Frame of Mind (2015) show.

Indeed, Bonachela does of late seem to be edging towards a greater degree of character exposition and hints of personal narrative. In short, his work just seems to be more human, and that’s certainly the case with Ocho. It’s delightful to see Bonachela and Cheng connect on this fundamental level.

Sydney Dance Company in Rafael Bonachela’s Ocho. Photo: Pedro Greig

As if to emphasis the complementary nature of the evening, the 16-member company is divided straight down the middle so there are eight dancers in each work with strictly no overlap. It’s a lovely round number and therefore eminently suitable for Full Moon, which employs five women and three men while Ocho uses the reverse combination. (And don’t forget: Ocho is Spanish for eight.)

In the numinous Full Moon, made doubly so by Damien Cooper’s exquisite lighting, there is a profound sense of eternal motion, and not only because Cheng’s piece has thrilling eruptions of speed and full-bodied swirls. He also finds vivid life in what appears to be complete stillness, arrestingly seen as Sam Young-Wright stands in the half-light with Jesse Scales astride a shoulder, both of them alert and energised, and Bernhard Knauer sits serenely on the floor for many minutes, his demeanour a mixture of relaxed poise and deep contemplation before rising to dance with glowing Janessa Dufty.

They embody the constants of existence: breath in and out, the circular flow of blood and the creation and release of energy. From time to time dancers are spotted standing apart or lying in the shadows but they never seem subservient to the action around them. No dancer ever leaves the stage and one is always aware of where each is.

Holly Doyle in Full Moon. Photo: Pedro Greig

Cheng’s richly detailed and often surprising choreography frequently works at varying speeds simultaneously, propelled by Lim Giong’s gleaming commissioned score. It’s almost as if alternate universes have met and melded: Full Moon requires intense concentration. At one moment the eye is caught by the serene companionship of Chloe Leong and Todd Sutherland, then attention is demanded by Latisha Sparks’s acrobatic leaps and surges, given extra fullness by her wild red dress (Fan Huai-chih’s costumes are just gorgeous).

Most striking of all is Holly Doyle in her long striped gown, often covering her face with her hair, extending a dagger-like leg high or turning inexorably like a whirling dervish. Cheng isn’t afraid of emotional extremes. Perhaps you can blame the full moon.

Ocho, like Full Moon, uses the power of stillness but here it’s not a form of inner radiance. It is menacing and painful, a prelude to attack or an expression of neediness. Ocho, if you will, is the dark side of the moon.

Despite the bleak intimations of this brutal, post-apocalyptic image of life, each woman and man in Ocho is an individual with clearly expressed wants and each is riveting. First seen as disconnected figures in a coldly lit glass enclosure, Bonachela’s five men and three women emerge singly to mark their territory. The atmosphere is incredibly threatening, aided and abetted by Nick Wales’s new score that blends brass, flute and electronica in a most unsettling way.

Davide Di Giovanni, front, in Ocho. Photo: Pedro Greig

When all but one have ventured into the open the competitiveness is ferocious. The one who stays behind, Charmene Yap, is tentative and vulnerable, although all are needy. At some point they all scatter to go who knows where but return to the known quantity of their sordid fish bowl (terrific set and costumes by David Fleischer, lights by Cooper). When they touch, they cling to one another with what looks like desperation.

LUX Tenebris – Light in Darkness – is the name of Rafael Bonachela’s new work but it could well have been chosen to describe Sydney Dance Company’s new double bill as a whole. The company’s reprise of Alexander Ekman’s Cacti, which opens the evening, puts the audience in a happy, buoyant mood. Lux Tenebris then takes a violent journey into the shadows with extreme physicality and bruising encounters.

Bonachela has taken the gloves off with Lux Tenebris. It’s not often his company looks this wild and tough. As the work starts the dancers prowl around like feral cats, get into lightning-fast tussles with others and then do a runner. It ends that way too, everyone fleeing from something.

The title may suggest a dichotomy but Lux Tenebris operates almost entirely in the dark recesses of the mind. Illumination in a technical sense (Benjamin Cisterne designed) either flickers on and off nervily or is a crepuscular veil or cone. Where there is some light it seems to indicate a place to inhabit briefly then retreat from. Bonachela appears to have wanted to suggest balance between the two forces but Lux Tenebris has a mind of its own and makes a different call. It’s an unequal contest.

Charmene Yap and Todd Sutherland in Lux Tenebris. Photo: Peter Greig

The atmosphere is edgy and mysterious, created in no small part by the commissioned electronic score from Nick Wales that evokes the vastness of the universe as it buzzes, hums, clanks and drones. Again darkness predominates, although there are melodic chords suggesting chinks of light that insinuate themselves from time to time into the dense fabric.

(Speaking of fabric, the only misstep in Lux Tenebris is the costuming from Aleisa Jelbart, who puts some surprisingly daggy shorts and shirts on stage.)

The 40-minute work feels challenging and unsettling, despite the underlying formality of the structure that follows Bonachela’s penchant for series of solos (Juliette Barton’s, in which she appears to be trying to escape from herself, is magnificent), duos and groups. The only sense of real connection is in two incredibly close, sexy, needy duos from Charmene Yap and Todd Sutherland (both superb), and the lovely, momentary linking of the whole group in a line that soon disintegrates.

The dancers always look sharp but here sleekness gives way to ferociously strong and muscular attack. They need it for this hugely demanding work.

The evening starts with the return of Cacti, first danced by SDC in 2013. Ekman made it in 2010 as a riposte to pretentious critics – surely he had not yet experienced the clarity and wisdom of Australian reviewers – and the dance took off like wildfire. About 20 companies have it in their repertoire (Royal New Zealand Ballet has Cacti in its current season, Speed of Light, and National Ballet of Canada premieres it on March 9).

Sydney Dance Company in Cacti. Photo: Peter Greig

What’s in it for the audience? Happily Ekman turned his dismay at being misunderstood into a laugh-aloud funny jeux d’esprit that fizzes with energy, particularly in the goofy opening in which a string quartet wanders around playing Schubert amidst music hall-style clowning and complicated manipulations of small platforms. Ekman is even-handed enough to poke fun at the choreographic process too and a delightful time is had by all.

The choreographer raises fewer questions than he may think but I’m not going to argue with a piece this attractive and well made.

A version of this review first appeared in The Australian on March 2.

CounterMove ends in Sydney on March 12. Canberra, May 19-21. Melbourne, May 25-June 4. Regional tour of NSW, Queensland Northern Territory and Western Australia June 17-August 13.

POSTSCRIPT:

On the CounterMove opening night it was announced that Sydney Dance Company would take 2014’s Interplay on tour to Switzerland, Germany, Brazil, Chile and Argentina in April and May. In Europe the company is part of Dance Festival Steps, a multi-city biennial showcase for contemporary dance that this year also includes work from Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Wayne McGregor, Aakash Odedra with Rising, seen last year in Perth and Brisbane, and Huang Yi, whose Huang Yi and Kuka will be seen in Sydney in mid-March before its appearances at Dance Festival Steps. Sometimes the dance world can seem a rather small place.

Interplay is a terrific triple bill, the memory of which sent me back to my review of March 2014. Who knows? You may want to take a trip to one of the seven venues at which SDC is appearing. Well, you could go to one of six. The performance at Neuchâtel on April 23 is listed as sold out (the website is http://www.steps.ch).

The Australian, March 19, 2014

WHAT a rich, diverse evening. Sydney Dance Company’s Interplay offers three works, any two of which would have given a stimulating experience, but who’s complaining? Each makes a strong appeal to a different human need and shows the SDC dancers in shape-shifting, magisterial form.

Rafael Bonachela takes on Bach’s Violin Partita No 2 in D Minor for an intellectually challenging engagement between movement and music; the second new piece, Gideon Obarzanek’s L’Chaim!, has heart and joy; and the revival of Jacopo Godani’s Raw Models well, that gives the libido a workout.

Sydney Dance Company in Raw Models, part of Interplay. Photo: Wendell Teodoro

Violinist Veronique Serret plays for Bonachela’s piece, called 2 in D Minor, planting her feet firmly on the stage and engaging fiercely with the dancers. Also on the program is new music from Stefan Gregory (invigorating, rhythmic tunes for L’Chaim!) and Nick Wales (intriguing electronic miniatures that act as contemporary interludes for in 2 in D Minor, based on Serret’s playing). This is a big, big show.

Bonachela’s piece doesn’t always rise to the complexities and nuances of Bach but has many luscious moments, particularly in sections involving Charmene Yap, David Mack and Cass Mortimer Eipper. On Monday night Yap embodied the music with alert, sinuous grace, frequently making eye contact with Serret, and David Mack and Cass Mortimer Eipper’s closely intertwined duo in the first movement also gave the sense of bodies merging with the music and emerging from it. There was a fine contrast in the second movement, Corrente, when Fiona Jopp’s lively solo was more external: a performance bubbling on top of the music.

As the piece progressed some of the dance material and structures lost their juice when familiarity set in. The solo interludes between movements were the surprise element, with white-clad figures offering present-day, somewhat anguished homage to Bach. These interpolated pieces were danced on a square of light on the stage, mirroring the skylight-like light that hovered above the Bach movements. (Benjamin Cisterne created the set and lighting.) I couldn’t help but think these little dances referred to the noble struggle involved in living up to the genius of Bach.

When Raw Models premiered in 2011 I was struck by the various meanings of the word model it evoked: fashion, mechanical device, computer modelling. This time the piece felt a little different. Overall there isn’t quite the level of chic and haughty sheen the original cast brought to it but it is still very sexy. The ripples, poses and elongations of seven dancers dressed in skin-tight black bring to mind the enacting of a creation story or perhaps, given the gloom and frequent blackouts, rebirth from a catastrophe.

Whatever it is, it’s happening in a galaxy far, far away. These superb physical specimens may look human but could well be aliens from the planet Glamour Major. The opening night crowd went wild, particularly (and rightly) for Yap’s knockout duo with Andrew Crawford, a man with the wingspan and majesty of a golden eagle, both of which he puts to excellent use in Raw Models (Crawford is unfortunately no longer with SDC).

Where Raw Models demonstrates the vast gulf between elite performers and their audience, L’Chaim! seeks connection. Folk dancing is the choreographic impulse and the illustration of community. A disembodied voice (that of Zoe Coombs Marr, text is by David Woods) asked company members questions – some banal, some impertinent, some useful – about themselves and what they felt about dancing. The idea is an extension of a long-running interest Obarzanek has in why people dance and what dance means, and there is a work of greater depth there for the taking. L’Chaim! is already an endearing addition to the inquiry.

Wearing a motley array of ordinary clothes, the full SDC company beautifully illustrated how highly trained bodies can move in ways denied the rest of us. Then, as they almost imperceptibly let go of their technique, they movingly showed how a civilian may be absorbed into the dance.

Footnote: for the European performances Serret will once again be the violin soloist for 2 in D Minor and Obarzanek will take on the role of the interrupting actor in L’Chaim!

DANCE is my great passion but this year there wasn’t a huge amount to bowl me over.Certainly I saw plenty of fine dancing – when does one not? – but in classical ballet there were few new works of substance. Well, none actually. There were pleasing new versions of existing ballets, although they didn’t quite make it to the list. New versions of oft-told stories is business as usual for ballet.

In Sydney there were new contemporary works I failed to see because the seasons were so short – this city isn’t exactly dance central – but there were a couple of new (or newish) pieces that added some excitement. Happily I was able to travel a bit and that helped me see enough to constitute what I might consider a quorum for a list of notable productions. If I saw it in this country I’ve included it, which is why American Ballet Theatre and Trisha Brown Dance Company appear alongside the locals.

As in my earlier posts looking back on 2014, works are mentioned in the order in which I saw them. There is a supplementary international section at the end. I intend to do a separate post on the men and women of the year so if someone rather than something appears to be missing, they may well be mentioned tomorrow.

DANCE WORKS OF NOTE IN 2014

Am I, Shaun Parker & Company, Sydney Festival and Sydney Opera House (January): A strong addition to this meticulous choreographer’s body of work. It looked and sounded stunning. Nick Wales, who has worked many times with Parker, contributed a new score full of fascinating colours, rhythms and sonorities, played and sung by a group of seven musicians. Meticulous, elegant and sophisticated, Am I ambitiously took ideas from physics, astronomy, neurology, anthropology and other branches of science to chart the path of human development. We are the only creatures who can apprehend ourselves as conscious beings with a limited span. Having evolved to that point, our drive is to survive and replicate, to make love and war, and to think about things too much.

Gudirr Gudirr, Marrugeku, Sydney Festival (January): Dalisa Pigram is a passionate advocate for life in Australia’s north-west. She wove a memorable solo from themes relating to the area’s indigenous history, polyglot population, environmental beauties and present-day challenges. Simultaneously wiry and elastic, Pigram seamlessly incorporated shapes from indigenous dance, martial arts, animal imagery, gymnastics, the nightclub and the circus for a wholly individual effect. When she spoke in her traditional language, Yawuru, it became a liquid element in Sam Serruys’s score, which also included songs from Stephen Pigram.

Interplay, Sydney Dance Company (March): The triple bill of Rafael Bonachela’s 2 in D Minor, Jacopo Godani’s Raw Models and Gideon Obarzanek’s L’Chaim! made a cracking evening. Bonachela’s take on Bach’s Violin Partita No. 2 in D Minor was an intellectually challenging engagement between movement and music; the second new piece, Gideon Obarzanek’s L’Chaim!, had heart and joy; and the revival of Jacopo Godani’s Raw Models – well, that gave the libido a workout.

Chroma, The Australian Ballet (April): Wayne McGregor’s Chroma wasn’t as brilliantly danced as it can be when I saw it but it’s a tremendous work. In seven swiftly moving, grandly conceived scenes the choreographer captures on the dancer’s body some of the myriad neural impulses that make it move, think and feel. Undulation, distortion and hyper-extension are a big part of the movement language but we can also see fragments of the classical ideal shimmering through Chroma. The juxtapositions are absorbing: small and large, inner and outer, action and repose, contemporary and traditional, the body and the space it occupies. Also on this generous quadruple bill, Jiri Kylián’s Petite Mort. The AB always does Kylián well and in Petite Mort there is so much to love: men with fencing foils, intimations of darkness and some outstandingly sexy dancing with lots of little orgasmic shudders.

Patyegarang, Bangarra Dance Theatre (June): The story of Lieutenant William Dawes and young indigenous woman Patyegarang in colonial Sydney should be better known. In the tumultuous first years of white settlement, as the British colonisers imposed themselves and their culture on what is now the glittering city of Sydney but was then the Eora nation, Dawes studied and recorded the local language. Patyegarang appears to have been his most important teacher. Stephen Page turned this rare and precious relationship into an impressionistic, meditative work.

The Arrangement, Australian Dance Artists (July): This little jewel could be seen by invitation only, and I was one of the lucky ones. Prime mover was artist Ken Unsworth, who may be in his ninth decade but has lost none of his zest for the complexities of human existence, often casting an absurdist eye on events. He made a cameo appearance at the beginning of The Arrangement to usher in a series of scenes connected not by any narrative but by themes of love, longing, the passage of time and the cycle of life. The mature ADA dancers were former London Contemporary Dance Theatre artists Anca Frankenhaeuser and Patrick Harding-Irmer and Sydney Dance Company alumni Susan Barling and Ross Philip. The Song Company sang texts by A.E. Houseman, Federico Garcia Lorca, W.H. Auden, Barnabe Googe and Rainer Maria Rilke to Jonathan Cooper’s commissioned music, and it was all very fine indeed. Unsworth finances ADA productions entirely – a great labour of love.

Keep Everything, choreographed by Antony Hamilton for Chunky Move (August): There wasn’t much that was more fun than this. A stage strewn with trash, three incredibly virtuosic and multi-skilled performers, a race through the human story from pre-history to the stars and back again and plenty of stimulating ideas along the way.

American Ballet Theatre, Brisbane (September): Forget Swan Lake; the Three Masterpieces program was the one to see. Jerome Robbins’s Fancy Free was highly enjoyable, but the real treats were Twyla Tharp’s Bach Partita, which was recently revived by ABT after a 28-year hiatus, and Alexei Ratmansky’s Seven Sonatas. Glorious works both.

Trisha Brown Dance Company, Melbourne Festival (October): Trisha Brown was a leading figure in the post-modern dance movement in New York and her influence runs deep. The survey of her work at the Melbourne Festival showed exactly why, but it was far from a history lesson or an academic exercise. Brown’s intellectually rigorous and highly technical dance-making is deeply concerned with the physics and geometry of the body and its relation to the space in which it moves, and her purpose is not to mimic or evoke emotional states. Yet the varied program demonstrated one quality above all that animates the work: intense, soul-filling joy.

The Nutcracker, The Australian Ballet (November): Peter Wright’s version of The Nutcracker is frequently said to be the most beautiful in existence, and there is a lot of competition. When I see Alexei Ratmansky’s newish production for American Ballet Theatre I’ll get back to you on who is the winner. But quibbles aside, this certainly is a sumptuous-looking production, even if it looks rather cramped on the stage of the Joan Sutherland Theatre at the Sydney Opera House. Even better, it touches the heart.

INTERNATIONAL NOTES:

A highlight of my New York visit early this year was finally getting to see the Jerome Robbins masterpiece Dances at a Gathering, a suite of dances to Chopin piano pieces that has no narrative but is full of connections between the dancers. To see it performed by the company for which it was made in 1969 was a dream come true.

On an all-Balanchine bill at New York City Ballet, Concerto Barocco (1941), was a revelation. Made to the music of Bach’s Double Violin Concerto in D Minor, Concerto Barocco is said to mark the first appearance of Balanchine dancers in practice clothes, something that would become a feature of many works. Here the women are all in white, with a little skirt. Eight women who form a kind of chorus of handmaidens, two principal women and one man move in unison, canon, mirror one another, and enter and leave in response to the music. Poetry and harmony reign and the detail is delicious: at one point the solo man is gently entangled in a thicket of the supporting women; at another he turns a simple promenade of his partner into courtly admiration. Just lovely.

IT’S hard to know where to begin with Andonis Foniadakis’s fantastical Parenthesis, a piece that turns the dial up to 11 and then some. Perhaps praise for Sydney Dance Company’s ferociously committed dancers should come first. They are a super-talented and game bunch who can do anything Foniadakis throws at them, which is quite a lot in a fast-flowing 30 minutes. If the choreographer were a five-year-old you’d be inclined to think he’d over-dosed on the red cordial.

The speed and physical virtuosity are undeniably exhilarating and Foniadakis is not without wit as the dancers swagger on and off like self-regarding hip-hop stars, undulate like seaweed or sway in lines like a Busby Berkeley chorus line on the Peruvian marching powder. The images keep piling up. Benjamin Cisterne’s gloomily lit setting is a curtain of floaty fringes that evokes the sea bed, Tassos Sofroniou’s costumes for the women combine cheerleader sass with hints of ancient Rome and the emergence of two dancers in body-hugging skin tones brings to mind Adam and Eve. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea meets Gladiator meets Gold Diggers of 1933 in a raunchy Garden of Eden – it’s quite a mind trip.

Andonis Foniadakis’s Parenthesis. Photo: Wendell Teodoro

Parenthesis has nothing new to offer on the subject of human interaction, which Foniadakis professes to be his subject. Yes, there are groups interacting vigorously and couples intertwining, but one expects that in dance. Something else one sees a lot of these days is the extreme manipulation of women by men and Foniadakis unfortunately doesn’t resist the urge. His image-making in this respect certainly gave me pause for thought amongst all the frantic activity.

It was wonderful, therefore, to see how Sydney Dance Company artistic director Rafael Bonachela negotiates partnering in his new work, Scattered Rhymes, which opens the evening. It’s a classical-looking piece with its alternation of ensemble and pas de deux in six movements, expressed via luscious, expansive movement and a strong sense of the value of the group, even when fractured. There is a particularly lovely duet for Janessa Dufty and Fiona Jopp with strong, close partnering and I was sorry that the intense third duet, for Thomas Bradley and newcomer Petros Treklis, was not longer.

Bonachela’s dancers may be scattered at times and they may be dressed identically, but they are individuals, not molecules to be tossed about in the maelstrom.

Both pieces featured new commissioned scores, Bonachela’s from Nick Wales and Tarik O’Regan and Foniadakis’s from Julien Tarride. The Wales-O’Regan score alternates, as does the dance, between idioms. It uses fragments of 14th century text and 21st-century electronica in rich juxtaposition. There is text in Tarride’s score too, but of a particularly banal kind, presumably intentionally. I do hope so. His punchy soundscape, however, keeps the show racing along until a slow fade at the end, in which Foniadakis indulges himself in an image that may have been meant to look ecstatic but radiated all the charisma of soft porn.

Parenthesis is, obviously, wildly entertaining. It’s also a bit ridiculous. I would have preferred to see Scattered Rhymes follow it as a palate-cleanser, but Bonachela is a gentleman and always cedes pride of place to his guests. He’s also smart. Judging by the audience response at the opening-night performance Parenthesis is a big hit.

I was introduced to Foniadakis’s work at the Perth International Arts Festival in 2009 when his Selon Desir (2004) was danced on a mixed bill by Ballet du Grand Theatre de Geneve. It suffered from being on the same program as Loin, by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui – an infinitely more interesting choreographer in my opinion – but looking back at my review I am also reminded that it wasn’t just that I greatly preferred Loin, but that I really, really disliked Selon Desir, which I thought incoherent and tedious. Parenthesis is a more interesting piece but it is essentially sensationalist; it lives vibrantly and sometimes vulgarly in the moment but leaves little trace.

WHAT a rich, diverse evening this is. Sydney Dance Company’s Interplay offers three works, any two of which would have given a stimulating experience, but who’s complaining? Each makes a strong appeal to a different human need and shows the SDC dancers in shape-shifting, magisterial form.

Rafael Bonachela takes on Bach’s Violin Partita No. 2 in D Minor for an intellectually challenging engagement between movement and music; the second new piece, Gideon Obarzanek’s L’Chaim!, has heart and joy; and the revival of Jacopo Godani’s Raw Models – well, that gives the libido a workout.

Violinist Veronique Serret plays for Bonachela’s piece, called 2 in D Minor, planting her feet firmly on the stage and engaging fiercely with the dancers. Also on the program is new music from Stefan Gregory (invigorating, rhythmic tunes for L’Chaim!) and Nick Wales (intriguing electronic miniatures that act as contemporary interludes for in 2 in D Minor, based on Serret’s playing). This is a big, big show.

Bonachela’s piece doesn’t always rise to the complexities and nuances of Bach but has many luscious moments, particularly in sections involving Charmene Yap, David Mack and Cass Mortimer Eipper. On Monday night Yap embodied the music with alert, sinuous grace, frequently making eye contact with Serret, and Mack and Mortimer Eipper’s closely intertwined duo in the first movement also gave the sense of bodies merging with the music and emerging from it.

There was a fine contrast in the second movement, Corrente, when Fiona Jopp’s lively solo was more external: a performance bubbling on top of the music.

As the piece progressed some of the dance material and structures lost their juice when familiarity set in. The solo interludes between movements were the surprise element, with white-clad figures offering present-day, somewhat anguished homage to Bach. These interpolated pieces were danced on a square of light on the stage, mirroring the skylight-like light that hovered above the Bach movements. (Benjamin Cisterne created the set and lighting.) I couldn’t help but think these little dances referred to the noble struggle involved in living up to the genius of Bach.

When Raw Models premiered in 2011 I was struck by the various meanings of the word model it evoked: fashion, mechanical device, computer modelling. This time the piece felt a little different. Overall there isn’t quite the level of chic and haughty sheen the original cast brought to it but it is still very sexy. The ripples, poses and elongations of seven dancers dressed in skin-tight black bring to mind the enacting of a creation story or perhaps, given the gloom and frequent blackouts, rebirth from a catastrophe.

Whatever it is, it’s happening in a galaxy far, far away. These superb physical specimens may look human but could well be aliens from the planet Glamour Major. The opening night crowd went wild, particularly (and rightly) for Yap’s knockout duo with Andrew Crawford, a man with the wingspan and presence of a golden eagle, both of which he puts to excellent use in Raw Models.

Where Raw Models demonstrates the vast gulf between elite performers and their audience, L’Chaim! seeks connection. Folk dancing is the choreographic impulse and the illustration of community. A disembodied voice (that of actress Zoe Coombs Marr, text is by David Woods) asked company members questions – some banal, some impertinent, some useful – about themselves and what they felt about dancing. The idea is an extension of a long-running interest Obarzanek has in why people dance and what dance means, and there is a work of greater depth there for the taking. Nevertheless L’Chaim! is already an endearing addition to the inquiry.

Gideon Obarzanek’s L’Chaim! Photo: Wendell Teodoro

Wearing a motley array of ordinary clothes in a nondescript space (costume Harriet Oxley, set and lighting Cisterne) the full SDC company beautifully illustrated how highly trained bodies can move in ways denied the rest of us. Then, as they almost imperceptibly let go of their technique, they movingly showed how a civilian may be absorbed into the dance.

Interplay runs in Sydney until April 5. Then Canberra, April 10-12, and Melbourne, April 30-May 10.